THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017
17
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELL
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT
ONE HUNDRED DAYS
O , Donald Trump will
have occupied the Oval O ce for
a hundred days. For most people, the
luxury of living in a relatively stable de-
mocracy is the luxury of not following
politics with a nerve-racked constancy.
Trump does not a ord this. His Presi-
dency has become the demoralizing daily
obsession of anyone concerned with
global security, the vitality of the natu-
ral world, the national health, constitu-
tionalism, civil rights, criminal justice, a
free press, science, public education, and
the distinction between fact and its op-
posite.The hundred-day marker is never
an entirely reliable indicator of a four-
year term, but it's worth remembering
that Franklin Roosevelt and Barack
Obama were among those who came to
o ce at a moment of national crisis and
had the discipline, the preparation, and
the rigor to set an entirely new course.
Impulsive, egocentric, and mendacious,
Trump has, in the same span, set fire to
the integrity of his o ce.
Trump has never gone out of his way
to conceal the essence of his relation-
ship to the truth and how he chooses to
navigate the world. In , when he
was about to announce plans to build
Trump Tower, a fifty-eight-story edifice
on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street,
he coached his architect before meeting
with a group of reporters. "Give them
the old Trump bullshit," he said. "Tell
them it's going to be a million square
feet, sixty-eight stories."
This is the brand that Trump has cre-
ated for himself----that of an unprinci-
pled, cocky, value-free con who will in-
sult, sti , or betray anyone to achieve his
gaudiest purposes. "I am what I am," he
has said. But what was once a parochial
amusement is now a national and global
peril. Trump flouts truth and liberal val-
ues so brazenly that he undermines the
country he has been elected to serve and
the stability he is pledged to insure. His
bluster creates a generalized anxiety such
that the President of the United States
can appear to be scarcely more reliable
than any of the world's autocrats. When
Kim In-ryong, a representative of North
Korea's radical regime, warns that Trump
and his tweets of provocation are creat-
ing "a dangerous situation in which a
thermonuclear war may break out at any
moment,"does one man sound more im-
mediately rational than the other? When
Trump rushes to congratulate Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan for passing a referen-
dum that bolsters autocratic rule in Tur-
key---or when a sullen and insulting
meeting with Angela Merkel is followed
by a swoon session with Abdel Fattah
El-Sisi, the military dictator of Egypt---
how are the supporters of liberal and
democratic values throughout Europe
meant to react to American leadership?
Trump appears to strut through the
world forever studying his own image.
He thinks out loud, and is incapable of
reflection. He is unserious, unfocussed,
and, at times, it seems, unhinged. Jour-
nalists are invited to the Oval O ce to
ask about infrastructure; he turns the
subject to how Bill O'Reilly, late of Fox
News, is a "good person," blameless, like
him, in matters of sexual harassment. A
reporter asks about the missile attack on
Syria; he feeds her a self-satisfied de-
scription of how he informed his Chi-
nese guests at Mar-a-Lago of the strike
over "the most beautiful piece of choc-
olate cake that you've ever seen."
Little about this Presidency remains
a secret for long.The reporters who cover
the White House say that, despite their
persistent concerns about Trump's at-
tempts to marginalize the media, they
are flooded with information. Everyone
leaks on everyone else. Rather than de-
mand discipline around him,Trump sits
back and watches the results on cable
news. His Administration is not so much
ateamofrivalsasitisanewformofre-
ality entertainment: "The Circular Fir-
ing Squad."
This Presidency is so dispiriting that,